Lawmakers were unable to gather enough votes this week to overturn President Karol Nawrocki’s veto of the Crypto-Asset Market Act, leaving the country without a regulatory roadmap even as adoption races ahead.
A Growing Economy Without Guardrails
Recent data from Chainalysis paints a striking picture: Poland is now one of Europe’s largest crypto ecosystems, with transaction activity jumping more than 50% year-on-year. It also ranks eighth in Europe for total on-chain value received, and a wave of Bitcoin ATMs has made it the fifth-largest BTC ATM hub in the world — bigger than El Salvador, despite that country’s Bitcoin-as-legal-tender status.
The irony isn’t lost on observers: Polish citizens are embracing crypto faster than regulators can decide how to govern it.
Politics Stops What MiCA Was Supposed to Start
The rejected legislation was meant to plug Poland into the EU’s MiCA regulatory architecture, offering a unified framework for exchanges, asset issuers and service providers.
Instead of ratification, the bill was blocked — and Nawrocki justified his veto by claiming the proposal threatened civil liberty, financial security and state stability.
With parliament unable to override him, the entire legislative process must restart from scratch.
Industry Split Over Whether the Bill Would Help or Harm
The proposal didn’t fall along simple “pro-crypto vs. anti-crypto” lines.
Security-minded lawmakers supported it, saying Poland risks foreign exploitation — including from Russia — without stronger oversight.
Yet several domestic industry voices feared the opposite problem: over-regulation, high compliance burdens and even personal legal exposure for executives, which they warned would drive capital and startups elsewhere.
The Veto Leaves Everyone Waiting
Instead of a compromise, Poland now has neither stricter oversight nor the aligned framework Brussels is moving toward. For companies, that means continued uncertainty. For policymakers, it means rewriting — and possibly re-fighting — the bill from the ground up.